Intel Xeon Gold 6130 Power Consumption
We wanted to post a few figures from our testing that show the real selling point of the chips, low power.
- Idle: 73W
- 70% Load: 144W
- 100% Load: 187W
- Peak: 201W
Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.8C and 72% RH. Our testing window shown here had a +/- 0.3C and +/- 2% RH variance. These are great power consumption figures.
Intel Xeon Gold 6130 Market Positioning
Thes chips are not released in a vacuum. Instead, they have competition on both the Intel and AMD sides. When you purchase a server and select a CPU, it is important to see the value of a platform versus its competitors.
Intel Xeon Gold 6130 v. Intel Xeon
We generally tell those that we advise who are looking at Intel Xeon Scalable that this is where they should start in the model range if they are looking for performance. There is a clear delineation between the Xeon Bronze, Xeon Silver, and Xeon Gold 5100 series and what the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 has to offer. Regarding overall system cost, upgrading may be several hundred dollars over the Gold 5120 before discounts, but if you want performance, this is a much better option.
Looking at the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 compared to the Gold 6132, they tend to trade off spots on the leaderboard based on the workload’s profile. If you want single core performance for per-core licensing the Intel Xeon Gold 6134 is a better option. If you have a lot of RAM in the machine, you may look to move up the SKU stack considerably to leverage your investment.
Intel Xeon Gold 6130 v. AMD EPYC
Unlike the Intel Xeon Gold 5100 series, the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 is much more competitive than AMD EPYC. Naysayers will immediately point to the per chip costs. Frankly, the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 uses less power than a 16 core AMD EPYC 7351P so the operating costs one needs to take into account. Intel is also aggressively discounting its Xeon Scalable CPUs to the point that the price difference on a given deal may be borderline negligible regarding system costs. The AMD EPYC has more PCIe and more memory channels but also has the drawback of having four NUMA nodes per socket while the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 has only one. Also, for dual socket server applications, the cost gap narrows considerably when you are not looking at the AMD EPYC “P” series parts priced extremely aggressively, but that are unable to scale to two sockets.
There are certain workloads where a given architecture is better than the other. For single-threaded performance, the Intel Xeon Gold 6130’s 3.7GHz cannot be matched in the current AMD EPYC range giving it a clear advantage. Overall, it is a tough one to call between the two options.
Final Words
We like the Intel Xeon Gold 6130. Although it is “only” 16 cores, it also has a solid 3.7Ghz single core turbo clock. Pricing is not set for high discounts like the Platinum line that we discussed in the piece: How the Intel Xeon Platinum is a Marketing Headache. If you are thinking about a 14 core Intel Xeon Gold 5100 series CPU, this is likely a better option for a relatively low incremental cost. This is the sweet spot of the market where Intel has an attractive product. It is priced similarly to the Intel Xeon E5-2683 V4 yet has new features and much better single threaded performance. This is an area where the Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 to Intel Xeon Gold 6100 series transition pays off for buyers. Thusly, we feel that we can recommend the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 to STH readers as a great Intel Xeon Scalable CPU option in this range.
When 256 GB of RAM is enough the Threadripper becomes a viable option in many cases with the introduction of samsung ECC U-DIMM DDR4-2666 CL19 32 GB sticks (Samsung model number: M378A4G43MB1-CTD).
TR2950X is half the price of a 6130 and in many cases a lot faster and it has 60 free PCIe 3.0 slots
Misha Engel – Threadripper / Threadripper 2 are not really competitors in the server space, even with low capacity 16GB UDIMMs. For the past few months, it has been hard to even get 4GB/ 8GB DDR4 RDIMMs. In the last week, we have added 260x DDR4 modules to the lab. 4x are 16GB, 256x are 32GB (48x 32GB RDIMM, 208x 32GB LRDIMM)
There may be a very niche market for a TR server, but without RDIMM support, and single-socket only support, it is a small niche. Single socket server sales are relatively small still.
AMD EPYC was also not a real competitor in the server market and we all know what going on at the moment.
It’s been hard to get any kind of memory for the last few months. ECC-U-DIMM 256 GB might not be perfect but it might be a start of something new. It happened before
There is something about the bar charts here that I think could be better. When a chart has one bar per CPU, the CPU-under-test has a black bar and the others have blue bars, which is great. But, when a chart has two bars per CPU, both colors are used for every CPU, and the CPU-under-test does not stand out, and I have to scan the labels to find it. It’s kind of inconsistent.
Misha, are you sure that M378A4G43MB1-CTD is ECC UDIMM? Can’t find it anywhere mentioned with ECC support. Thanks!
KarelG: Sorry it is M391A4G43MB1-CTD the other one is without ECC
Misha: Cool, this looks like it’s happenning at the end. Ryzen with 128GB, TR with 256GB, nice!
KarelG: If you want single core performance for per-core licensing(3.8 GHz all-core with a 9 cm Noctua air cooler), or a FreeNAS server or just a workstation with a lot of RAM this looks like a great option. And you also have the freedom to overclock those memory (both bandwidth and CL). Xeon-W is not going to like this.
Thanks for the very nice analysis of the Xeon Gold 6130. For single CPU systems, how would Gold 6130 compare with non-scaleable options such as Xeon W-2155?